While spending summers at a boys' camp in New Hampshire, he became acquainted with the small town ethos that would later permeate many of his works. Kunstler spent most of his childhood with his mother and stepfather, a publicist for Broadway shows. His father was a middleman in the diamond trade. Kunstler was born in New York City to Jewish parents, who divorced when he was eight. Currently-lives in Saratoga Springs, New York.Education-B.A., State University of New York, Brockport.With the cost of oil skyrocketing-and with it the price of food-Kunstler’s extraordinary book, full of love and loss, violence and power, sex and drugs, depression and desperation, but also plenty of hope, is more relevant than ever. Their challenges play out in a dazzling, fully realized world of abandoned highways and empty houses, horses working the fields and rivers, no longer polluted, and replenished with fish. There may be a president, and he may be in Minneapolis now, but people aren’t sure. Transportation is slow and dangerous, so food is grown locally at great expense of time and energy, and the outside world is largely unknown. In World Made by Hand, an astonishing work of speculative fiction, Kunstler brings to life what America might be, a few decades hence, after these catastrophes converge.įor the townspeople of Union Grove, New York, the future is nothing like they thought it would be. In The Long Emergency celebrated social commentator James Howard Kunstler explored how the terminal decline of oil production, combined with climate change, had the potential to put industrial civilization out of business.

Kunstler world made by hand